Unbecoming: A Novel

by Rebecca Scherm

  He rolled his eyes. “If it’s all the same to you, ma’am, I’d rather not go through the particulars.”

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “I just told you I didn’t.”

  “I mean, about anything.” This was idiotic, this hand patting. He would think that was what she was doing. But she felt generous and daring. Look! She wanted to whisper. I just stole this from the Wynne House! Nothing is as bad as it seems!

  His eyes were blank with anger and blinking fast. “No, I don’t. You’re not my girlfriend, Grace.”

  “I know I’m not, but I am your friend, and—”

  “No,” he said, standing up. “Do me a favor, okay? Don’t try to make me feel better. Don’t even talk to me.” Alls then gave her a look of such withering disgust that she could not say a word.

  He went into his bedroom and closed the door.

  • • •

  She told Riley that she’d paid only twelve dollars for the inkwell.

  “I think it might be worth something,” she said.

  He wiped some dark, gunky dust from the lion’s roaring mouth with his pinkie finger. Outside the historical context of the Wynne home, its value did seem dubious.

  “If I’m wrong we can keep weed in it,” Grace said. “But I don’t think I’m wrong.”

  She would sell the inkwell and help him out, and then he would see that she had not given up. She had merely redirected her ambitions and reclaimed her smarts, her grit, her allure. She would be not diminished by her return home, but transformed.

  But after trawling the Internet and the Garland College fine arts library for information, she couldn’t value the inkwell. She found no identifying markings, and the materials didn’t tell her anything. Even the nailheads in the base were inconclusive. What if she’d stolen something stupid? What if the Wynne docents had peeled off the gold made-in-China sticker before they’d plunked it on the desk? She’d never come up empty before.

  She called Craig Furst. She couldn’t call Donald; she’d have to explain too much. She knew Craig had a taste for “gentleman” things—desk blotters, shaving kits, valets, humidors.

  “Grace!” he said. “How are you?”

  “I’m well, thank you,” she said. “And you?”

  “Oh fine, fine. Going to Boston to do a huge estate tomorrow, probably take me three days just to take photos of it all. Massive collection. The off-grid aristocracy, if you know what I mean. They’re so desperate to legitimize. What are you doing? Donald working you to the bone?” He chuckled.

  “No, not really,” she said, relieved that he didn’t even know she had gone.

  “Oh? Do you think he—and your school, of course—could spare you for a few days? You know I’d love an assistant with me.”

  “I’d love to,” Grace said. “But I’m not in New York right now. I had a death in the family.”

  “I’m so sorry! No one close to you, I hope.”

  “My grandfather,” she lied. “He’d been sick for a long time.”

  “Terribly sorry to hear that.” He sounded as though he meant it.

  “This is going to sound so crass, but that’s sort of why I’m calling you. He left me a few things, and it’s been a lot of fun, actually, finding out what they are and where he got them and tracking them down and all.”

  “Grace, are you appraising your inheritance?” He laughed conspiratorially. “It’s an addiction, I know.”

  “Just for information,” she said quickly. “I just want to know where—”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. No one ever admitted their desire to sell off the family heirlooms, not at first. There was a required series of dance steps to get to that point—mourning the dead, enjoying their memories, discovering their treasures, “learning about them,” feigning surprise or masking disappointment, and then and only then, quietly selling it all off.

  “What do you have?” he asked.

  “An inkwell. Totally unmarked, no stamps or anything. A bronze lion with a marble base, about five inches high. The lion has glass eyes, and you lift the top of his mane to get to the well.”

  “A lion! How charming. Is the ink bottle glass or pottery?”

  “Porcelain, I think. And very irregular—not by machine. I think it could be nineteenth century.”

  “Sounds like it. Could be Austrian, or maybe French. Can you send me a picture?”

  She said she would, and he asked her to have coffee when she returned. And then, just after she’d thanked him again and just before she hung up, he asked her why she had not asked Donald.

  Of course he would wonder that. She could have said that she had asked Donald and he hadn’t known, but of course Craig would tease Donald about that.

  “I asked him about another piece,” Grace said. “I don’t want to wear out my welcome asking for freebies.”

  “Ha! Fair enough,” he said.

  • • •

  The lion was unmarked precisely because it was so special. Craig Furst said the inkwell was Austrian, 1860s; the porcelain interior was the giveaway, and he’d never seen a piece quite like it. Usually, he wrote, the “power” animal motifs in inkwells are standing, looking predatory and masculine, etc. But your lion, sitting down, looks . . . cute. The glass eyes are really wild. Was your grandfather a big softie? (And not that you asked, but I’d say $800–$1,100 retail.)

  Grace called an antiques store in Nashville, the first fancy-looking listing she found. She told them what she thought she had and asked if they were interested, and they were. Could she send a picture?

  Sure, she almost said. But then she realized that she’d already screwed up, taking a picture of it for Craig. Now there was a trail, however short, going right into her e-mail.

  “I can just bring it in,” she said. “I’m in the area this weekend.”

  The next day, she took a Greyhound bus to Nashville and sold the lion inkwell for $655. She told Riley the good news when she got home, insisting he take the money for his car payment or repair, whatever he was prioritizing. “We’re married,” she said. “Your problems are my problems too.”

  If Grace could have relied on the docents’ poor eyesight and consistent amnesia, she would have robbed the Wynne House every day, one little objet at a time. She felt sharp and in control. She’d helped Riley, and she’d hurt no one. But she had already been there three times. She couldn’t go back again.

  She hated that she’d lied to Riley about where she’d gotten the inkwell. How stupid and unnecessary—that lie chewed at her, another sin to atone for without his knowing. She never used to lie to him. There was one thing she would never tell him, but these little lies had to stop. She knew they made her lonelier, built the wall between her and Riley, or between what they had now and the love they used to have, a few bricks higher every time she told one. And Riley would have loved the idea of stealing desk accessories from the Wynne House. He would have eaten it up.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said in bed the next night. “Don’t worry.”

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “I didn’t buy that inkwell from Lamb’s,” she smirked, rolling to face him in the dark.

  “You didn’t?”

  “I stole it,” she said. He looked at her, waiting, sure he hadn’t heard right. “I stole it from the Wynne House. I went on a tour—”

  “Again? Another tour?”

  “Another tour, and I took it. The docent wasn’t looking, and I just—took it.”

  “Christ,” he said. “Why?”

  “So you could make your car payment. And to see if I could, I guess. To see what would happen.” She tried to sound sassy, playful, but it sounded wrong. She’d said it all wrong.

  He sat up and turned on the light.

  “That stuff is all just sitting there, and nobody gives a shit about it, and—what? I thought you would—” she faltered. Would what? Congratulate her?

  “Would what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t say it r
ight.”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  She swallowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Lately, you’re just—not yourself. Really weird, actually. Irresponsible.”

  “Sorry, Riley, but there’s not much to be responsible for. I get up, have nothing to do, read, run, look at the jobs, wait for you—”

  “I mean, I figured you were depressed about school, but you won’t tell me what went so wrong up there—”

  “I flunked out,” she said angrily. “I failed three of my four classes and the fourth gave me a B, but I have no idea why.” She shut her eyes.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What the fuck would I say? There’s no good reason. There’s no excuse. It just happened. I got that job, and I got way too involved, and I forgot that school was, you know.” She shrugged, awkwardly, since she was still lying down. “The reason I was there.” The truth was even more humiliating once she said it out loud. She had loved her job’s proximity to precious objects—being trusted with them, in a way. For as long as she could remember, she’d studied how she appeared to others, but to become the appraiser? To wield the power of evaluation, approval, dismissal? Knocking an old chair down a few hundred dollars had given her pleasure. All for Donald, at thirteen dollars an hour, ostensibly to help her pay for a college that was costing her $302 each day, many of which she had skipped to work.

  She started to cry and tried to keep talking through her seizing throat. “I couldn’t tell anyone. It’s just too pathetic.”

  “Christ.” He pulled her toward him and she wept on his chest. “You should have told me.”

  “I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  “It would have explained a lot. I thought you were unhappy with me.”

  “No,” she blubbered. “I could never be unhappy with you.”

  He sighed and stroked her head, and there they lay in repair, the forgiver and the forgiven.

  19

  No one wanted Riley’s car. He’d felt so flush when he bought it, he admitted; he couldn’t imagine not having more money. He thought he’d sell a painting every month, that the commissions would come rolling in. But he’d satisfied Garland’s needs better than he’d meant to.

  They tacitly agreed to revise their memories of the inkwell argument for a tonal adjustment. Riley was determined to laugh—at the inkwell, at himself. He pointed to the objects in Grace’s photos from the Wynne House, playing a version of The Price Is Right. “How much for that one? Three grand? Four? Too bad you couldn’t fit that in your pocket.”

  She knew now how she’d screwed up. He had always been the rascal. She was supposed to play the goody-goody, Pollyanna looking over her shoulder for parents, teachers, and cops. Taking something from the Wynne House should have been his idea. If Riley had been on the tour with her that day, Grace could have cocked an eyebrow and he would have put the lion in his pocket, and later, he would have gloated as she pretended to scold him. That was how they worked; she knew their roles, and yet she hadn’t really seen their limits until now. She vowed to do better. Every couple hit a rough patch from time to time. She would pull them through.

  • • •

  On a Tuesday night in late February, Grace was eating vanilla ice cream in the Grahams’ living room after dinner with Riley, his brother Colin, and Dr. and Mrs. Graham. They were all talking about basketball, or they had been, and Grace had gotten lost imagining her teeth in Alls’s shoulder, the nakedness of his stare, and (God, how unfair to remember this so well) the way he’d nuzzled down her belly, down between her thighs to tease them apart.

  “Gracie and I are bored,” Mrs. Graham said, startling Grace out of her daydream. “We’ll see y’all later.” She crooked a finger at Grace for her to follow.

  Mrs. Graham led Grace upstairs into the master bedroom and shut the door behind her.

  “They do go on, don’t they?” she said, going to her closet. “Gracie, tell me, how are you doing?”

  “Fine.” Grace swallowed. “Relieved. To be home.” Since she’d come home, she’d avoided being alone with Mrs. Graham, fearing that Riley’s mother would somehow know, that she would look at Grace and see exactly what she was hiding.

  “I know you two must have missed each other something awful,” Mrs. Graham said. “You’ve never had to be apart before.”

  So this would be that conversation. “Yeah,” Grace said. “I thought I could imagine it, but I just couldn’t do it. I mean, I didn’t want to.”

  “You know, Dan and I didn’t go to college together,” she said. “He was at Garland, but my parents sent me to Sweet Briar, you know. He’d drive up for any long weekend, but it was so hard. Well, you know.”

  “I know it’s supposed to be hard and I’m supposed to do it anyway,” Grace said. “But I don’t think I can. Maybe because of where I went—maybe it would have been different if I’d gone to Vanderbilt or Sewanee. I just couldn’t find my . . .” She gave up. I had sex with Alls, she imagined saying. I had sex with Alls, and I married your son.

  Grace had thought Mrs. Graham had gone to her closet to get a sweater, or to show Grace something she had bought, but Grace now saw that Mrs. Graham was only straightening a row of shirts on their hangers, looking into their collars instead of at Grace.

  “And it was too expensive,” Grace said quietly.

  Mrs. Graham turned around holding a pale green blouse. Her first name was Joanna, but Grace had never called her that, and even though she secretly thought of Mrs. Graham as her real mother, she couldn’t imagine calling her anything but Mrs. Graham.

  Mrs. Graham fingered the blouse’s collar. “Don’t I know it,” she said absently. She smiled. “Honey, remember at Thanksgiving, when Dan gave you some money to give to Riley?”

  Grace’s hands were under her thighs. She dug her nails into her jeans. “What money?”

  “He gave you an envelope, with money inside,” she said carefully. “For Riley’s supplies.”

  It had been three hundred dollars in cash, crisp fifties. Grace had meant to give it to Riley, but she hadn’t. She’d used it for his Christmas present and some other things; she could hardly remember now.

  “I don’t remember,” Grace said, growing hot at her temples. “He did?”

  “Yes, about three hundred dollars.” She didn’t seem to know what to say then, and neither did Grace. “I told him not to do cash, in case it got lost or something. But he didn’t want Riley to have to go to the bank, since he was working all hours for his show.” She went back to her closet and hung up the blouse.

  “I didn’t open it,” Grace said, groping for time. “It’s probably still in my coat pocket.” She’d given over her last paycheck to Riley. She had no way to come up with that money until she found another job, but if she could just hold off—

  “Oh, your winter coat? Downstairs?” Mrs. Graham’s shoulders collapsed in relief.

  “Yes,” Grace said with false hope that quickly became real. Maybe the envelope would be there; maybe she hadn’t spent the money. She held on to this prayer as she stepped downstairs, Mrs. Graham right behind her, to check her pockets. But of course there was no envelope. There were drugstore receipts and a ChapStick, a few crumpled straw wrappers.

  “Oh dear,” Mrs. Graham said. “What could have happened to it? Do you think you put the envelope somewhere? I’m sorry, honey, but three hundred dollars is a lot of money, and Dan was in such a piss that Riley never thanked him, and I wondered if—well, let’s just try to find that envelope.”

  But three hundred dollars wasn’t that much money, not to the Grahams. Grace’s sudden flare of anger only made her more scared and more ashamed.

  “I don’t remember taking it out,” she said. “It could have fallen out at the airport? Or I guess someone could have taken it? Oh no, I had this dry-cleaned.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Graham said, biting her lip. “That’s certainly possible.”

  “This is awful,” G
race said. “Let me pay you back. I’m so sorry I lost it.”

  She expected Mrs. Graham to say that it was okay, that everyone lost things now and then, and let’s go downstairs and get some ice cream. That would be the Mrs. Graham–like thing.

  But Riley’s mother smiled grimly and took Grace’s clammy hand in hers. “Honey, I’m saying this out of love. You know that.”

  The heat shot up Grace’s neck and wrapped around her skull in a second. Mrs. Graham’s face floated before her like a too-bright light.

  “It’s not the first time something like this has happened, right?”

  Grace shut her eyes.

  “When you took one of the little silver spoons, I—I was even a little touched. And a scarf once, and some earrings, remember?”

  Mrs. Graham was talking as if Grace had stolen the spoon, the scarf, the earrings. You couldn’t steal your mother’s earrings, not if you were her daughter. Grace had just wanted to have them as a piece of—

  You couldn’t steal from your own household—that was the point. Riley took his brothers’ old things and his dad’s pocket change all the time. That wasn’t stealing. That wasn’t wrong. It was family.

  “But this is different,” Mrs. Graham went on. “This is another kind of thing.” She swallowed. “And we love you, and we just want to take care of you and make sure you have what you need. You need to talk about this with someone, okay?”

  Grace wanted to die and she wanted her hand out of Mrs. Graham’s, so she pulled it back.

  “Gracie, it’s okay. We’re going to get you some help. Maybe we should talk to your mom?”

  Grace lurched forward in a silent sob.

  Mrs. Graham put her arm around her. “I’m just glad it was us, instead of—you’re here with us and it’s going to be okay.” She rubbed Grace’s back. “Oh, sweetie, I didn’t mean for you to—I’m used to yelling at boys! Come here, honey. We didn’t tell Riley, okay? Is that what you’re worried about?”

  • • •

  How had they not told Riley? Curled like a bean on their bed back in their room on Orange Street, Grace pled menstrual cramps as she clutched at her stomach. That was what this misery felt like, her insides being carved out of her.